Iraq is negotiating away its militias’ guns. It is not negotiating away their impunity.

On 26 June, Faleh al-Fayyad, the chairman of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, inaugurated a new “Department of Human Rights” within the organization he leads. The announcement would be almost darkly comic if it weren’t so consequential. Washington designated Fayyad a human rights abuser years ago for his role in one of the bloodiest episodes in modern Iraqi history: the killing of more than 500 unarmed protesters during the 2019 Tishreen demonstrations, with thousands more wounded and hundreds detained illegally. The officer he installed to run the new department, Abu Muntadher al-Husseini, is accused by the same rights groups of helping carry out that violence. Seven years later, neither man has faced a courtroom.

This is the backdrop against which Iraq’s 30 September disarmament deadline is unfolding, and it is the part of the story that keeps getting lost.

Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has made “restricting weapons to the state” the defining project of his young government, with strong backing from Washington and a fresh $60 billion package of American energy and business deals to sweeten the deal. Some militias have moved to comply. Others, like Kataib Hezbollah, have dismissed the deadline on social media as “empty bravado.”

Analysts at Chatham House call full disarmament “an impossible task,” given how deeply the factions are embedded in Iraq’s security and economic institutions. All of that is real, and all of it matters.

But a second negotiation is running in parallel, almost entirely out of public view. It is not about weapons. It is about consequences.

Iraq’s human rights record over the past decade is not in dispute. Amnesty International’s most recent annual assessment, published this June, found that “security forces, armed militias and political actors continued to commit serious human rights violations with near-total impunity,” while “judicial dysfunction left victims of violations without justice or reparations.” A separate review of the 2025-2026 period documented at least 35 targeted killings of activists and journalists since 2020, attributed to so-called “unknown gunmen,” with not a single prosecution. The pattern has not stopped. On 2 March of this year, activist Yanar Mohammed was assassinated in Baghdad. Investigations were announced. Nothing has been made public since. Just weeks ago, Amnesty issued a fresh statement calling on Iraq’s government to “chart a new course by ending impunity,” citing that same unbroken chain of unresolved killings.

None of this is abstract to the militias now being asked to hand over their weapons. It is, in fact, precisely why so many of them are hesitating. Their leaders are estimated to have diverted billions of dollars from Iraq’s oil economy and from commercial channels running through Iran, Europe and the United States.

Some carry the weight of documented killings, abductions and torture reaching back to the Islamic State war and forward through the Tishreen crackdown. What they are quietly seeking from Baghdad, before they agree to disarm, is not a security guarantee. It is a legal one: Amnesty from prosecution, and no serious inquiry into where the stolen money went.

Iraq has effectively been here before. A 2021 Amnesty International investigation into the PMF’s arming and conduct called for “thorough, transparent and independent investigations” into extrajudicial executions, abductions and torture, and demanded that anyone “reasonably suspected of serious human rights violations must be excluded from service.” Five years on, the same militia structures are being invited into a state-brokered disarmament process with no visible accountability mechanism attached. The recommendation was not implemented. It was overtaken by a deadline about hardware, not justice.

This is where the disarmament conversation, as currently framed by Washington and Baghdad alike, goes quiet. American officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have been explicit that Iraq must “assert its sovereignty and disarm the Iran-aligned militias” to deepen ties with the United States. Nobody in that conversation has made accountability for Tishreen, or for the disappeared, or for the tortured, a precondition of anything. The message reaching militia commanders is unambiguous: surrender the rifles, and the rest can be negotiated quietly.

For Iraq’s civil society, this is the actual test of whether 30 September means anything. A state that successfully confiscates weapons while leaving the command structures, the financial networks and the impunity of the men who used those weapons fully intact has not reformed itself. It has simply changed the terms of the militias’ power, from coercion by force to protection by law. Families of the Tishreen dead, of Yanar Mohammed, of the thousands documented in Amnesty’s files, are watching a process that treats their cases as separate from, rather than central to, what “disarmament” is supposed to achieve.

Iraq’s neighbors are moving on without waiting to see how this resolves. The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan on 7 August has already redrawn the region’s security architecture, and Baghdad is not part of it.

Whether Iraq ever earns genuine sovereignty, rather than a rebranded version of the status quo, will not be decided by whether weapons change hands on 30 September. It will be decided by whether the men who used those weapons against their own people are ever made to answer for it.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.